JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies

Nkiru Nzegwu

In this essay, I examine some Igbo communities that anthropologists have long described as patrilineal. The objective is, first, to determine the accuracy of the description and to ascertain if there is a correlation between patriliny and patriarchy; and second, to determine in what ways the notion and ideology of motherhood in Igbo society challenges the prevailing characterization of the society as patrilineal. Early anthropological studies of Igbo culture by G. T. Basden, Northcote E. Thomas, Sylvia Leith-Ross, Margaret M. Green and C. K. Meek hardly focused on the epistemological significance of motherhood and the social importance of being a mother.[1] While Basden, Thomas and Meek paid attention to husbands as fathers and to men’s activities because they viewed the society as “largely based on patriarchal lines,”[2] motherhood, for them, was something that happened to women after they were married. Since, in their mind, wives were structurally subordinate to husbands, they concluded in their descriptions of family relations that motherhood lacked social and epistemic significance.[3] By contrast, Leith-Ross and Green identified the importance of motherhood in the culture but failed to pursue its significance and of what it portends for the conventional understanding of so-called patrilineal families. Against the background of the 1929 women’s war, they were more interested in understanding the subjectivities of the Igbo woman, and in presenting her as an individual. Until Ifi Amadiume directly engaged the topic of motherhood in Igbo society in 1987, few anthropologists before her had done so in a comprehensive manner.[4] Prior to that most of the stimulating discussions had taken place in literature, notably in the novels of Onuora Nzekwu (Highlife for Lizards) and Flora Nwapa (Efuru).

The questions that set the pace for this study of motherhood’s challenge to patriliny are: Does the fact that descent is reckoned through the father imply the existence of patriliny? If not, why? Did Onitsha, Anambra, Njikoka, and Awka Igbos in the northwestern part of Igboland really trace descent through the father? In what ways were Igbo societies patrilineal? Are societies patriarchal simply because they are patrilineal? If not, what is the status and role of mothers in Igbo family system? And what is the philosophical significance of motherhood on the character of family organization? Answers to these questions have serious implications for received ethnographic wisdom. It is not only that they provide a new understanding about how descent runs through the line of mothers. But if motherhood is tied to the family structure that shapes it, mischaracterizing the structure would inevitably distort our understanding of motherhood as well as limit the roles, rights, and power of mothers. To understand the rights and powers of motherhood in Igbo society is to question the patriliny construction of some Igbo societies.

Defining Patriliny and Patriarchy

Clear terminology is important, and so definitions of “patriarchy” and “patriliny” are essential at the outset. “Patrilineal,” a term given ample explication in anthropology, refers to a system of family organization in which descent is traced through the father. This descent may be traced on the basis of biological fatherhood, that is, on the basis of strict blood continuity, so that all descendants are progenies of the father. In describing northwestern Igbo societies as patriarchal, Basden, Thomas and Meek provided an analysis of families that represented it as an institution with a single center of power. Their viewpoint was that power reposed in fathers and mothers were powerless subservient beings. This construction of families conflated patriliny and patriarchy and ignored the fact that northwestern Igbos traced descent on the basis of “social fatherhood.”[5] Within this latter system, the one who provided the bridewealth was the legal father, and there was no strict adherence to blood continuity. Children were not necessarily the biological offspring of the social father. Descendants were an amalgam of members who were not all blood descendants of a founding ancestor, and who may not even be male. Matters are compounded when the founding ancestor is female; or when a wife prevented the closure of her marital family by having children with other men. In both these instances, the term “patriliny” does not meaningfully explain the complex patterns of Igbo family relationships in the past nor does it establish the existence of patriarchal relations.

Although Basden, Thomas and Meek recognized that fatherhood was social, they understood this notion of fatherhood on the biological model. Drawing from their own cultural experiences, they treated social fatherhood as if it were biological fatherhood, unwittingly substituting in the process the latter for the former. Consequently, Basden and others missed how their notion of biologized patriliny differs from the Igbo notion of social fatherhood. They failed to see that the latter fits into family relations in a manner that neither conferred sovereign status to fathers nor supreme powers to men. Whereas Basden, Thomas and Meek’s attribution of biologized patriliny to northwestern Igbo societies excluded the possibility that mothers were also founders of lineages and towns, the Igbo conception of social fatherhood made no such exclusivist claims.

The problem with the ethnographers’ interpretive scheme is that it downplays the nonbiologized notion of fatherhood and the specific intra-family relations sustaining it. They made family cohesion of these societies exclusively dependent on paternal ties and on men as a group. Basden states: “[a]fter marriage the woman is ranked with the other property of the husband with a proportionate value attached, but little greater than that of the cows and goats.”^[6] Meek writes, “There is little doubt that many Ibo husbands do, in fact, regard their wives as, to some extent, a form of property which they can treat as they please” (279). By so doing, they subsumed northwestern Igbo families under the European-derived model of patriarchal family prevalent in social anthropology. While it is true that the notion of fatherhood is significant in tracing descent in Igbo culture, these British ethnographers mistakenly imagined that their biologized conception of ‘patriliny’ and a patriarchal family system captured the essence of the Igbo fatherhood.

Patriarchy describes the locus and center of power in families. It vests power in fathers at the family level and in men at the community level. Despite suggestions to the contrary, families are not automatically patriarchal simply because they are described as patrilineal. Powers and responsibilities must be distributed in certain ways and along specific lines for a family to be described accurately as patriarchal. Although Western and some Igbo researchers seem to think that attributing patriliny to family systems establishes its patriarchal character, that supposition is misguided. An additional set of practices, customs, and rules about power and control are required to turn Igbo families into a patriarchal one. What warrants this false supposition is an epistemological scheme that presupposes a European biologically-based understanding of fatherhood and a patriarchal distribution of power in families.

When we move out of this faulty epistemic scheme, we are better placed to make a crucial distinction between patriliny as a form of family organization and patriarchy as the locus of power in families. Structurally, patriliny does not identify the locus of power in families because there are different conceptions of father and different patterns of power distribution in families. Rather, patriarchy is the concept that marks the investment of authority on fathers and names the social scheme that treats men-as-a-group as having power and rights over women-as-a-group.[7] Under patriarchy, women’s sexual and reproductive capacities are commodified and controlled by men; and whatever privileges or power women have derives from, and is dependent on their singular attachments to men.[8] Clearly, mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives, lack autonomy within a patriarchal system. As Gerda Lerner further points out, even when property relations within the family have developed “along egalitarian lines than those in which the father wields absolute power,” the public realm of institutions and government are still structured by male dominance.[9] Patriarchy, she asserts, is the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance in society in general.

Carole Pateman cautions against understanding patriarchy simply as paternal right since this interpretation misses the other dimensions of that system of power and male domination.[10] She states that the modern variant relocates the basis of men’s rights from the family to the political arena of civil society and the state.[11] Modern patriarchy is based on contractual not natural relations that upholds masculine right rather than father-right.[12] Other feminist analysts of patriarchy agree that the single most determinant feature of the system is its culture of male domination. Sylvia Walby sees patriarchy as a system of social structures and practices, in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.[13] She argues that construing patriarchy as a “social structure” undermines the supposition that every individual man must be in a dominant position and every woman in a subordinate one.[14] She contends that it is immaterial that some men lack power and some women have power, because patriarchy is not a thesis about the social location of individual men and women. It is one in which men as a group are uniquely privileged and women as a group are distinctively disadvantaged.

If we keep all these refinements in mind, the question that confronts us is, were Onitsha, Anambra, Njikoka and Awka patriarchal societies at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as Basden, Thomas and Meek claimed? Did they possess a society-wide system of male domination? I argue that they did not. At the societal level, the intricate nature of Igbo social relations is such that men and women were not in a superordinate/subordinate position. At the family level, which is the focus of this examination, the family system of organization together with its extensive diffusions of rights, powers and obligation between the sexes, mothers and fathers, and in-laws was antithetical to the sort of familial and societal relations that patriarchy prescribed. Indeed to have been a patriarchal system, these Igbo communities would have required four additional key features. These are: (1) the concentration of powers in the hands of men over women as a group; (2) the division of a society into public and private spaces; (3) the domestication and exploitation of women, including the control of their sexual and reproductive powers and their restriction to the private space of the home; and (4) the systemic devaluation of women. All these features were absent in Igbo societies prior to colonization. However, in the face of massive Igbo women’s opposition in the first quarter of the twentieth century,[15] all four features were subsequently injected into Igboland through missionary activities, colonial laws and policies, and the Western mode of education.

Scrutinizing Patriarchy

Today, however, Igbo legal theorists contend that patriarchy is the characteristic features of Igbo families. In Modern Family Law in Southern Nigeria, S. N. Chinwuba Obi defines a patrilineal family as:

a social institution consisting of persons who are descended through the same line…from a common [male] ancestor, and who still owe allegiance to or recognise the over-all authority of one of their number as head and legal successor to the said ancestral founder, together with any persons who though not blood descendants of the founder, are for some reason attached to the households of persons so descended, or have otherwise been absorbed into the lineage as a whole.[16]

His definition is that a family is a corporate body with a family head and a council.[17] He asserts that the head is the oldest male member of the family, who may “be likened to a company’s managing director,” and the council “is composed of the heads of the various branches of the extended family, hence the name ‘family elders,’ which is sometimes used for that body”[18] Obi sees households as constituting the smallest subdivision of a patrilineal family: “[i]t consists of a man/patriarch and his wife or wives with their unmarried children and any other dependents such as wards and domestic servants.”[19] Adult daughters are not part of the family because “as marriage is virilocal, women cease to be members of their families (understood as a political unit) as soon as they marry, but retain their family membership (in the sense of a social unit) in spite of marriage, as we shall see.”[20] The important, but rarely discussed, feature of Obi’s definition of patriarchal family is the idea that a legal successor might not be a blood descendant, but rather simply someone who has been absorbed into the family.

The construal of family/lineage as squarely under the rule of a patriarch contains an element of ambiguity that undermines the idea that historically Igbo families had always been patrilineal and patriarchal. The ambiguity does not simply lie, as readers of Felicia Ekejiuba’s concept of hearth-hold may assume, at the absence of a passive, dependent wife whose primary role is the provision of sexual and housekeeping services to a husband. Rather, it lies in the constitution of the Igbo family, the notion of a father, and the idea that the lineage or the father line of descent may be broken and sutured with the help of another bloodline. The idea of breakage and suturing means that the father may not be the genitor or biological father of his so-called progeny, but a non-family member, an outsider. What then does it mean for a father to be a nongenitor? And what implications does this nongenitor role have for the concept of patriliny, and of family and social formations?

The nongenitorship role of fathers means that the representation of patriliny in Igbo society, as based on primogeniture and an unbroken line of blood descendants, is not entirely accurate. Slippages, reconstructions and attendant mythmaking go on in families, demonstrating that families were not always what they are often represented to be. Socially too, this pattern of mythmaking raises critical questions about what Igbo fathers understood fatherhood to mean given their acceptance of children they did not sire. Obi should have been aware that since he described families as constituted by a variety of unrelated bloodlines, there is also a need to explain how these unrelated bloodlines were absorbed into families tracing descent to a “common ancestor.” Through what processes did these unrelated bloodlines fuse into the true line of blood descendants? What social norms or sociopolitical events forced families to absorb non-blood descendants into the family? And following this absorption, what was the impact of the assimilation on the constitution and character of Igbo families? Lastly, to what extent could families properly be represented as patrilineal if the bloodlines do not go back to a founding ancestor but rather to multiple ancestors? And, what if the founding ancestor was a mother?

Obi did not address these questions even though intra family politics and relations are as important as supra family relations in defining the character of families. Yet these questions are especially important since he joins Basden, Thomas, Daryll Forde and Jones in representing wives as socially and legally inferior beings.[21] His failure to respond to these questions may be that sociological concerns were not the primary objective of his law project. He was interested in legal norms, and it was far easier to focus on norms that cohere with received ethnographic “truths” about the Igbo family system. But, the fact that Obi’s descriptions refer to “traditional” customs and practices creates an illusion of historical truths that suggests these customs had always been there and that Igbo families had always been patriarchal. This methodological sleight-of-hand throws a cloak of staticity over “pre-colonial” social institutions that have been subjected to change, an action that mars ethnographic explanations of Igbo cultural history. Nigerian sociologist, Peter P. Ekeh has harped on this shortcoming when he charged that major kinship terms and categories are imprecisely defined in African studies.[22] The problem, Ekeh argued, was that early social anthropologists had set a standard of research in place without “historical examination of societies to ascertain the nature and character of kinship” structure.[23] According to him, they tended to treat “kinship as constant over time in African societies,”[24] seldom probing “how long it has been in existence, why it was so dominant in Africa, or whether it was related to the slave trade that ravaged Africa before European colonization.”[25] While Ekeh’s point is that these studies should be critically reevaluated and corrected,[26] Obi’s theoretical forays entrenched the distortions by ignoring the sociocultural changes that occurred during colonial rule.

A meaningful response to the epistemological problems raised by Obi’s description of Igbo family calls for an investigation into what social history reveals about the character of families. To do this satisfactorily, we have to take seriously the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries history of Igboland, noting the deep psychological trauma and social chaos that characterized it. The trans-Atlantic slave trade had created a turbulent region marked by incessant kidnappings, Igala and Aro-engineered slave raids, vast movements of people fleeing the raids in search of refuge, and families’ heroic efforts to cope with the devastating losses of kidnapped members.[27] Recognition of this history compels one to confront the strategies adopted by families to deal with an unending attack on their existence.[28] At the very least, an engagement with this history forces us to avoid treating the “olden days” as a stable idyllic environment, or of reading the present history of social stability and Christianized, patriarchal values back into a turbulent period of history. It would also help to avoid misconstruing families as static and unchanging when improvisation and adaptation were the two dominant principles they employed to survive. Viewing families as dynamic systems require us to study the nature of Igbos’ responses to the two centuries long period of regional threat. Researchers who adopt this critical stance would necessarily discover that Igbo families were not the static, cohesive, male-dominant systems early European and modern Igbo male writers have represented in the literature. They were dynamic organizations that ingeniously responded to protracted periods of insecurity which radically modified their structures in myriad of ways. Survival needs prompted the socialization of members of the families along flexible, assertive and industrious lines.

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were periods of social instability in northwestern Igboland as the Aro expanded their slave trading activities. Conscious and unconscious decisions marked this period as families fought for their survival. In some regions, high birth rate was socially encouraged and privileged. In others, families boosted their numbers by absorbing unrelated bloodlines through the adoption of orphans, children whose parents had been kidnapped, or whom they had purchased in slave marts. They also assimilated adult immigrants (nnatambili) who settled with them. Prominent families of the period were made up of immigrants, domestic servants, and slaves[29] as well as nwa afo (child of the womb) who were part of the direct line of descent. But the most common way in which unrelated bloodlines were introduced into families was through birth. The possibility that the father pole may be breeched in this manner forces us to consider how such children were conceived especially since such conceptions have serious implications for the character of fatherhood. Since mothers were the pivotal figures in this drama, and because they were the vehicles for membership into family “bloodlines,” we have to examine closely the actions and status of mothers within the context of families that European anthropologists and Igbo male scholars have represented as both “patrilineal” and patriarchal.

Patriarchy Undermined: The Sexual Autonomy of Wives [30]

Speaking from a patriarchal standpoint, the father pole is compromised when mothers engage in sexual relations with men other than their spouse and then pass of the fruits of their liaisons as their husband’s child. When this breeching of the family bloodline is sanctioned by the community and happens quite routinely, then mothers must be in control of their own sexuality. To a large extent, sexual autonomy is rooted in their economic productivity, food production, and in control of the family’s food consumption. The occurrence of the latter condition is antithetical to patriarchy and the description of family systems as patriarchal.

It is public knowledge that Igbo mothers had lovers and often switched the bloodlines of their families and reconstituted the “father” pole of families.[31] They did this by engaging in two types of transmarital relationships:[32] those that were sanctioned by the community and those that were not.[33] Community sanctioned transmarital relationships occur: (a) when for professional reasons spouses, such as Awka blacksmiths and Nri ritual specialists, had undertaken journeys that kept them away from their conjugal units for months on end; (b) when a wife married other wives and the male genitor is not the husband (male) of the husband (female); (c) when the wife in the previous example of woman-woman marriage, in turn, married her own wife; (d) when a groom died without the birth of a male child to continue his line, and the widow selected a paramour with whom to produce an heir and continue the line; (e) when young widows with little children chose to have more children in their husbands’ name; (f) when the groom was impotent and was unable to father a child, and the aid of an obliging male surrogate was elicited; (g) when the mother of an infant male child married a mature woman for her son and the wife engaged in sexual relations with paramours; (h) when pregnancy did not occur within one year of marriage, and the wife returned to her natal home for “medicinal treatment” that included sexual liaisons with other male partners; (i) when a bride conceived between the post-uri and pre-ina uno period and arrived pregnant to her marital home;[34] (j) when a much older husband is unable to satisfy the sexual needs of a much younger wife and the wife elicits the services of a husband helper; (k) when a spouse was mentally unbalanced and sexual relations were ruled out for the safety of the wife; (l) when there were ritualized grounds for a bride/wife to take on a lover and she exercised that right; and lastly (m) when couples were estranged, but are not yet formally separated, and the wife engaged in sexual relationship with other partners. Non-sanctioned, but nevertheless prevalent, relationships occur when a wife entered into a sexual liaison with a partner outside of the identified extenuating circumstances, such as having relations in a sacred space, or with a member of her own kin group.[35]

Family-grafts, the result of transmarital relations, were fairly common in Onitsha and various parts of Igboland in the nineteenth century.[36] They continued to occur for most of the twentieth century, particularly when couples had difficulties conceiving a child. It is no secret that many children in Onitsha families were the product of such relationships. In fact, a mid-1970s attempt by an Odoje family to claim a biological son from the family into which he had been born, was widely rebuffed on the ground that the entire social fabric would unravel. The case revealed to all and sundry that family grafting was historically prevalent and acceptable. The very fact that there were fears of widespread social instability showed that family grafting was much more common than is readily admitted. In fact, a prominent family that today may claim to be Ikpeazu (from village x) may in fact have been the biological child of Ogbuli (from village y). Meanwhile, the myth that the Ikpeazu line continues uninterrupted is widely accepted until critical questions are raised about the exact genealogy of the line. It is important to stress that the construction of this family myth depends on suppressing the knowledge that one of the mother’s in the lineage had changed the bloodlines, effectively supplanting her husband, who is the socially recognized father, in family importance.

Family mythmaking and the preservation of family myths is an important political component in the continuity and survival of families. In postcolonial, Christianized societies, Igbo families have extensively reinvented their histories to bring their families in line with what they perceive to be proper Christian values. Consequently, ethnographers and sociologists must pay greater attention to this need of families to represent themselves in conformity with prevailing Christian ethical schemes. Prior to the prevalence and adoption of Christian mores the question of which pater constituted the line of descent was irrelevant because the collective view was that a husband of a bride is the father of the wife’s children, regardless of how they were begotten. Yet at the level of marriage relations, it was a very big issue because the society prohibits endogamy. Families had to know so as to preclude the possibility of biological siblings getting married. Consequently, genealogical screening that focuses on the fact that children may not have been fathered by the social father is a critical part of the marriage screening process. The fact that such screening occurs informs us not only that wives exercised their sexual autonomy, but that the community was aware of this fact.

Thus, against the backdrop of sanctioned and non-sanctioned reproductive relationships, the standard representations of Igbo families as one in which power rests solely on fathers are false. In his magisterial pronouncements, Obi following the lead of Basden, Thomas, Forde and Jones, was at pains to highlight the authority of the fathers and male members of the family, and the inconsequential role of mothers and adult female members of the family.[37] His claims ignored the ways mothers actually re-engineered families and introduced other bloodlines into the marital family. These mothers effectively displaced the line of the founding ancestor, and positioned themselves instead. If such a mother was very prominent, her uterine family unit subsequently took her as the reference point of identification as they trace their ancestry. Over time she may become the founding or dominant ancestor of the line. It is important to stress that this action of mothers in suturing broken lines helped to maintain the myth of family continuity. But as we shall later see, it profoundly altered the character and dynamics of the family. While Igbo male writers routinely represent the culture in ways that conceal transmarital relationships and family reconstitutions, these relationships cannot be swept aside as insignificant since they undermine the legitimacy of claims about the patriarchal structure of Igbo families. We cannot pronounce a family system as patriarchal when (a) it comfortably accommodates the sexual autonomy of wife, and (b) it enshrines the disruptive power of mothers. When both properties occur as they do in Igbo society family and social relations are nonpatriarchal and ungendered.

Nna as Social Fatherhood

For a variety of reasons of which historical events were one, fatherhood in numerous parts of Igbo culture was not defined biologically, or on the basis of the biologized notion of patriliny that pervades the discipline of anthropology. Doing so would probably have resulted in the closure of many families and lineages. Given an environment in which there was high incidence of kidnapping of people for the slave trade, social norms arose in which women controlled their sexuality after marriage and in other conjugal unions.[38] To protect husband’s rights, some northwestern Igbo societies chose not to make the identity of the genitor of the children an issue. They contended that it was not the act of impregnation that made one a father, rather it was marriage.[39] What mattered within this sexual scheme was that the child was born into a family that had received the legal and moral right to fatherhood from the bride’s family or minimal lineage. Setting up matters this way had social implications for fatherhood as well as for mothers. First, it detached sexuality from the institution of marriage; second, it placed wives’ sexuality outside the purview and exclusive control of husbands; and third, it made childbearing a prominent social duty for wives. But this reproductive responsibility of wives required the society to ensure that they had the requisite conditions to perform this task and become mothers should husbands prove unable to be adequate partners.

Onitsha, and most northwestern Igbo societies complied in the development of social norms and the formation of reproductive expectations that authorized wives to procreate whether or not their husband were around, and whether or not they were capable of impregnating them. This meant having a different understanding of marital obligation and of wife’s faithfulness. Under this ethical scheme, faithfulness was not tied to bodies but to loyalty of the lineage and so wives could retain their sexual autonomy. Spouses did not command the other to be chaste, nor did they expect each other not to fulfill their sexual urges with other partners. But they expected them to be loyal to each other’s families and to work for their safety. If for any reason a husband was unable to perform his sexual duties satisfactorily, the aid of a husband helper (paramour) was elicited. It would have been viewed as both unreasonable and unacceptable to expect a wife to repress her sexual needs or her desire for a child. Though, for Western readers, this child desire and childbearing duty may cast wives in the unflattering light of being just child producers, we should consider that this desire is also rooted in women’s positive experience of motherhood. Consider its numerous advantages. It provided the basis of their sexual autonomy; and it gave them the freedom to come into their own and to exercise their options without being constrained by vows of chastity. A far more important benefit for wives as a group was that motherhood ensured that husbands’ lacked controlling rights over their sexuality and reproductive rights, especially, in their quest to become mothers.[40] The effect of this spousal right of wives is the production of a specific type of fatherhood known as, nna (father), that is fundamentally social.

Quite unlike biological or biologized fatherhood, nna or social father is remarkably expansive. It is a notion of fatherhood that gives lineage rights to a wife’s offspring regardless of who is the genitor. In reality, however, nna or social fatherhood curtailed husbands’ rights over wives’ sexuality and reproductive rights. It was not that husbands did not care about their wives. It was more that the marriage was not modeled on private property relations that made a wife the property of her husband. The prime imperative of becoming a mother and proving her fecundity far outweighed any concerns that husbands and affinal families may have about wives’ chastity. Within the Igbo moral scheme that gives husbands the right to the products of a wife’s womb and not to her personhood, the social imperative of motherhood and the desire for children ranks higher than a husband’s ego. By virtue of this ranking, the right to motherhood and the terms of marriage emptied the notion of adultery of its meaningfulness. It removed whatever social opprobrium that could have inhibited any transmarital relationship. Although some categories of transmarital relationships were not encouraged they were by no means alu (abomination) or nso (unholy, unclean) and so did not have the fearsome stigma of moral impropriety attached to them. It is for this reason that husbands accepted all the children of their wives’ regardless of the circumstances of conception. The implication of this acceptance is that the Igbo concept of fatherhood entailed a conception of motherhood and panoply of wives’ rights that obstructed the development of a superordinate power for husbands as a group.

Nna or social father did not have the moral and family authority to control a wife’s reproductive capacities from which motherhood rights derived, and which added to his family’s growth. Procreation was after all the raison d’être for and the basis of marriage. Fatherhood rights were fundamentally structured on a mode of being that compelled a father/husband to curb the development of a superordinate ego, the very consciousness that is crucial in the development of patriarchal relations. Without the development of this egoistic streak, nna or the Igbo social father did not have recourse to the powers of a patriarch, nor did he define children as expressions of himself. Located within their local cultural schemes, Igbo fathers embraced all children and historically contended themselves with the post-reproductive role of caring for the children of the marriage, emotionally bonding with them as their father, and shaping them to be full members of the lineage. In all this, they never sought to overturn the mother’s dominant influence over her children, knowing that such actions may well alienate them from the children. Somewhat reinforcing this worldview and the subsidiary role of fatherhood is an Onitsha maxim that counseled fathers during the colonial male privileging era to: “not ask about who impregnated one’s wife, but to rejoice that one is the father.”

Nna, notion of fatherhood prevailed for many generations, probably because it historically provided the right conditions for the survival of the lineage. If fatherhood was biologically defined, the death of a married male would most surely close his line if the marriage had no offspring. Equally, too if he were kidnapped and sold off into slavery, his line and memory will be extinguished. However, if fatherhood was socially defined, as it was in Igboland, a father’s memory and line could continue even if he were no longer around. While this idea of memorialization and the social value of children may not totally explain the social conception of fatherhood, other factors too allowed it to prevail. Husbands would have had to accept the notion of social fatherhood if it was a social norm, and if it was the only condition under which prospective in-laws, who needed to protect their ada (daughters/sisters) from harm, would sanction a marriage in times of widespread insecurity. [I will use the Igbo word, ada rather than daughters and sisters or daughters/sisters because it best captures the culture’s conception of a daughter with its implicit connotation of a sister]. Given rampant kidnappings and slave raids, brides’ families were averse to marriages that required their ada to live far away from home, with families whose integrity they could not always gauge.[41] Families needed reassurance that nothing evil would happen to their ada especially if the marriage turned out to be unsuccessful. The possibility always existed that a disgruntled husband might connive and sell an intemperate wife to Aro slave traders. Such possibilities probably prompted communities to develop marriage norms that would help them ward off potentially egregious actions.

Given that children were an important raison d’être for marriage, an important area of marital discord was a wife’s failure to conceive a child. A husband could marry another wife if he had the means, but there was no guarantee that he could afford one. Thus, to raise a wife’s chances of becoming a mother, cultural provisions were made for a wife to try out with other partners. Precisely because the Igbo morality scheme did not accommodate the notion of adultery, these conventions on transmarital affairs were instituted. They did not undermine the social and ethical basis on which marriages were founded. It is worthwhile to remember that the northwestern Igbo marital norms did not confer on husbands’ exclusive authority over wives, who never became one with a husband. Rather, wives remained full members of their own natal families. The existence of marital conventions, in which wives retained their natal identity and were not the property of husbands, tell us that Igbo marriages were not structured on patriarchal grounds that required the total annihilation of a wife’s identity. The sum effect of family’s obligatory interest in the welfare of the ada was (a) the promotion of umuada’s (plural of ada) interests in ways that gave advantage to brides’ families, and (b) the formulation of marriage norms that subordinated husbands as a group to their in-laws. This subordination wrested immense autonomy for umuada whose families functioned as a protective bulwark against abuse from husbands and the affinal lineage.[42] The upshot is that the conception of husband and fatherhood that existed in Igbo culture was nowhere close to the autocratic, patriarchal model that underlay the social anthropologist’s conception of it.

Interrogating Virilocality

There was another consequence of family’s need to protect their ada. As dynamic structures, Igbo marriages and family systems resiliently adapted to the sociopolitical uncertainty created by the over two centuries of raids to supply slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade. As earlier stated, a prime reason for marriage and family modifications would have been concern for the safety of umuada of marriageable age. It is quite possible that contrary to assumptions, virilocality may not have been the norm just as Northcote Thomas’s 1913 survey of the Nri-Awka sub-region revealed that polygamy was not the dominant mode of marriage.

Families and umuada would have rejected virilocality in times of insecurity especially when suitors were foreigners and did not permanently reside within an acceptable geographical proximity. Foreigners, who may be from a community that is six miles or more away, could marry umuada when they resided in the community. Such marriages brought the conjugal unit under the sphere of influence of the wife’s family. In eighteenth century Onitsha, for example, Olosi, the daughter of Obi Chimaevi married a foreigner who had permanently settled in the community. Incidentally, this pattern of marriage was replicated by numerous Onitsha women of the period, resulting, too, in women founding diverse families and sections of Onitsha community.

It is quite conceivable that, for security reasons, virilocality was not a normative feature of marriage even for indigenes, and rather, that husbands frequently relocated to live with wives. If we took history seriously, we would refrain from reading present circumstances of virilocal marital relations and marital attitudes back into history, especially when history has offered other patterns of marital arrangements. Because historical conditions were different from present day experiences such relocations by grooms were possible. For one, land did not have the monetary value that it has today; it was not commodified, and it was much more available given the low population density. Historical evidence from Onitsha reveals that family settlement patterns and boundaries expanded and contracted and remained in flux in this period.

Up till the first half of the twentieth century, for example, Onitsha women who were in relationships and had children for Igala men did not move back with their children and paramours to Igala. They remained in Onitsha with their children. The only Onitsha women who lived in Igala were probably kidnapped just as Usse, the daughter of Eze Aroli, had been. She later returned to Onitsha with her adult son, Idoko, after the man to whom she was married died. Lack of regional security, and family’s uncertainty about the integrity of some suitors, would have been responsible for the creation of a phenomenon in which brides continued to reside with their families, leaving grooms and male companions either to relocate and live permanently with them, or to intermittently pay conjugal visits.

Spousal arrangements with male companions would characterize idigbe-type relationships. Another model in which a spouse paid intermittent visits to a bride could be characterized as the “separate living” model of marriage. Idigbe-unions allowed an unmarried female to live with a paramour with whom she had children. (This is a group of ada that Basden erroneously claimed were set apart to sexual entertain her father’s guests). She had full custody of all the children of the union who were absorbed as full members of her own lineage. The “separate living” model of marriage would occur during the period that a suitor gathered resources to complete his marriage rites. He would pay conjugal visits to the prospective bride. Some of these suitors settled with the family and became the immigrants that were absorbed into families. The two spousal models were not mutually exclusive. A “separate living” marriage did not preclude a man from being in an idigbe relationship. Either of these two models would explain the phenomenon that Thomas recorded in Agolo (sic) when he observed the presence of “men of 40 or 45 who have never married” but who had set up housekeeping. It is quite possible that these men were engaged in the abovementioned relationships without Thomas realizing it. Because he did not view the phenomenon through the reference frame of Igbo cultural practices, he wrote off the men as simply “too poor to buy (sic) a wife.”[43]

Unfortunately, Thomas’ choice of explanation represents a clear case of substitution of Igbo cultural framework for the Western epistemic one that assumes that only one model of marriage exists. It is true, as Thomas hypothesized, that the men were poor. Security concerns of the period obstructed the generation of wealth in the already infertile Nri-Awka region. The poor soil of the region would require men to bring formerly uncultivated area under cultivation in order to build a barn full of yams. Given that locally, wealth was generated through agriculture, the intensification of Aro slave trading activities would effectively hinder agricultural expansion since a lone farmer could easily be kidnapped while working at a remote farm. However, the fact that many men were poor and could not easily complete their marriage rites did not mean that they were not married or in long-term relationships. The “separate living” model of marriage would make sense to brides’ families as grooms gradually built up the requisite resources for the completion of their marriage rites. Meanwhile, the grooms would live with lineage siblings or paramours. In nineteenth century Onitsha and environs, local research of family histories show that a high number of women and men were in idigbe-unions, proving that the socioeconomic condition of the time was favorable to the prevalence of these unions as well as of woman-woman marriages.

If we treat Igbo history as dynamic, and we accord it the epistemic significance it deserves, we would not only be able to account for a range of marital practices that once existed in Igboland we could also account for their rational. A dynamic picture of changing social practices and marriage forms presents a complex, far superior picture of the culture than is presently represented in anthropological texts. The information they reveal invalidates received descriptions of Igbo families as patriarchal that is currently being used to understand Igbo families. If Igbo society in the “olden days” sanctioned the institution of idigbe for daughters, absorbed their children into their family, accommodated wives’ sexual autonomy, and allowed them to preserve their natal identity, then patriarchy could not have existed regardless of how social anthropologists, contemporary male historians, and female researchers manipulate their data. There is no question that northwestern Igbo societies had a structure of family organization and notion of fatherhood that is vastly different from the Western construal of families, and which is not captured by conventional definitions deriving from the Western episteme. What is often missed by the latter, is that in the not too distant past Igbo families included children of some of their ada, even though today these families are represented as wholly and historically constituted by sons and sons’ sons.[44]

The question, however, is could these families have been patrilineal in the Igbo sense of social father? Modern declarations about Igbo family as patrilineal and of Igbo father’s dominance are not generally borne out by historical facts. The issue here is not simply that contemporary descriptions are wrong, but that Igbo families were not patrilineal in the modern construction of the term given the sociological integration of an ada’s children into her agnatic family. While historical or cultural forces converged to create the narrative of father’s dominance in the post-slave trade period, the more immediate sociopolitical task is to ascertain the character of Igbo family prior to its transformation under Western narratives and influences.

De-Linking Conjugality and Family: The Logic of Consanguinity

From 1850 to 1968 at least, northwestern Igbo family structure was dominantly consanguineal. It was a complex, flexible multigenerational maximal and minimal lineage system that was constituted on the basis of kins rather than on conjugal spouses. The family or minimal lineage is often referred to in anthropologically-inspired texts as the extended family. But extended from what? The answer that, it is the nuclear family collapses the discussion into a Western ontological scheme that treats a husband, wife and children as the normative structure of families. Construing families as extensions of, or deviations from, the Western nuclear family erroneously makes conjugality the dominant principle of family organization even though the Igbo understanding of family is fundamentally consanguineal, not conjugal. Equally, too, privileging conjugality as the normative family relations as Amadiume did, misconstrues Igbo family system and imposes an inappropriate logic on it. Insofar as the traditional Igbo family is a consanguineal lineage system all matters about conjugality or derivations from conjugal unions, such as nuclear or polygamous family, male or female husbands, subordinate wife or dominant husband/fathers should recede to the background.

Discussions of Igbo family must be conducted on its own terms, and these should occur outside of the normative conjugal terms of reference that the twentieth century Western epistemic scheme sets as the standard for discourse. Serious discussions of Igbo family systems cannot presuppose or continue to draw upon European or Western family principle and structures that underlie the epistemic scheme of scholars’ work. Critical researchers cannot just interrogate history and recover facts. They must subject the recovered facts and their operative concepts and epistemic scheme to critique as well. We pay insufficient attention to the fact that these concepts were constituted with an epistemic scheme that drew heavily from social and ethical values and historical data of European societies. When scholars fail to adopt a critical stance, they are inevitably ensnared by the logic and metaphysics of conjugality to erroneously initiate a discourse of family that centers the conjugal unit as the Igbo family. Within this erroneous frame of reference, we discover that a dominant father and a passive wife becomes the standard mode for analyzing families everywhere.[45]

However, once the consanguineal logic of family descent is given epistemic priority in understanding Onitsha and northwestern Igbo families, two parallel lines of kins immediately emerge into focus. These are: the line of umuada (daughters/sisters) and the line of sons/brothers. At the head of the female line is isi ada (first lineage daughter), and di okpala (first lineage son) is the head of the male line. Descending in a hierarchal order is a multitude of generational nodal points among which were: umunna (all adult children of the lineage), umuada (all adult lineage daughters who may or may not live within family compounds), okpala (adult lineage sons), umu agbo (young unmarried girls), umu ilo (young unmarried boys), an umu aka (little children). Within this dual symmetrical family system, power, duties, and responsibilities radiate out along multiple intersecting paths, and coalescing along seniority lines. As heads of the family, isi ada and di okpala are consulted and their approval secured in matters affecting the family. Thus, contrary to Obi’s descriptions, which had assumed the logic of conjugality and represented families as male dominant spaces, the Onitsha consanguineal family system is not a homosocial, masculinist political space. The voices of umuada carry political weight within family systems because their line is a constitutive part of the family.

Because sex is the principle of family and social organization in the Igbo social scheme, it might seem that the society is gendered. The idea that biological categories constitute the basis for the assignment of social identities might force some to assume that the patriarchal scheme undergird the whole social scheme. However, to say that social division occurs on the basis of sex does not imply that the categories operate in a fixed, essentialized way or that males are assumed to be superior. Males and females still exist in a non-gendered society but no assumptions of superiority and inferiority is made about the inherent nature of the sexes. The reason for this is that persons in society embody multiple identities in line with their multiple roles and duties in the family and the society at large. As these social identities are fundamentally relational and continually shifting social valuation depends on the social role and social context the person is in. This means that no one is permanently locked into one identity and is always permanently subordinate or always permanently superior.

Prior to Christianization and Westernization, and the injection of patriarchal ethos, the Igbo family was the sum total of siblings born into the family/lineage. There were no aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, or cousins. There were just two kinship categories brothers and sisters or sons and daughters. The principle of consanguinity fostered a consciousness in which members were siblings regardless of who their mothers or fathers were, how they were conceived, and what the conjugal union of their parents was. They were siblings not simply because their bloodlines directly traced back to a particular ancestor, but because they were part of the legal and moral responsibilities agreed to by the lineage at the time of the children’s conception. To maintain family/lineage cohesion, umuada (daughter/sister) and umu okpala (sons/brothers) organizations and the overall umunna (children of the father or all lineage members) meetings functioned as systems of family unification. They decided which ancestral line and which personage would receive prominence, which to ignore, and which uterine unit or usokwu (the mother force) governed real family relations. These organizations authorized versions of lineage histories that were remembered, retold, and revised in light of changing family needs. It is not unusual that these histories were full of inconsistencies and contradictions given that they served political objectives and were revised to serve these ends.

Over time these politically reconstructed histories became the only recollected version of family history at which point they acquired the status of truth. Two examples of such revisions from Anioma Igbo history are the case of Edini, Odaigbo’s sister and founder of Ogboli, whom later narratives transformed into Odaigbo’s brother (interestingly, this version of a male Edini was the one accepted without interrogation by a contemporary male historian); another was Onuora, the senior sister of Umejei, whose line wondrously vanished as narrative emphasis was given to her younger brother in the tale of the origin of Igbuzo.[46] From the east of River Niger in the town of Onitsha, Richard N. Henderson highlights the material and logical inconsistencies in the accounts of how Agadagba became the diokpala (eldest senior son) and lineage priest of Umuezearoli (children of Eze Aroli).[47] It is worthwhile to note that in the process of revising these histories, progenies sometimes substituted a sister for a brother or a mother for a father in order to derive a founding male ancestor. Initially, these switches came about as researchers’ sought the founding father of the clan or village in response to the colonial and postindependent ideology of male dominance and male leadership. Propelled by the male-privileging episteme of the colonial era lineage spokesmen claimed descent from a specific male ancestor even though they were aware that a pivotal mother may have either founded or reconstituted the marital lineage with the bloodline of another lineage. Others have also reinvented themselves as descendants of prominent personages by inventing nonexistent sons.

Although the term umunna (children of the father that describes lineage members) suggests that all ancestors were fathers, not all founding ancestors were male. Some prominent families were established by mothers’ or on a mother’s usokwu (maternal center). Many of these female ancestors are currently being written out of history as families and communities succumb to the fashionable male dominant view of the modern Western world and are revising their history to deemphasize the role and authority of mothers. Interestingly, most anthropological and contemporary discussions of so-called Igbo patrilineal families rarely addressed the consanguineal character of relationships between umuada and sons/brothers. They generally took conjugal units as the point of departure, as if conjugality or spousal relations constituted the normative basis of Igbo families. But such an approach is false because in misconstruing the structure of the family, it completely blocks out the proper female sphere of importance in families. Consequently, it allows researchers to latch onto the subordinate role of wives, and to ignore the role of umuada in family spaces and in founding families and communities.

As the cases of Olosi, Usse, and sections of Obikporo lineages in Onitsha demonstrate, many umuada contributed to the expansion of their consanguineal family, by becoming idigbe or entering into idigbe unions and marrying wives of their own. Blocking out these actions of umuada makes it seem that all umuada married male husbands. This erasure erroneously channels theoretical analyses along pathways that facilitate patrilineal readings as well as validates the substitution of conjugality for kinship as the basis of family formation. The illicit move succeeds only because it obliterates the specific principle of family formation that provided options to daughters to remain at home either because they had entered idigbe unions, their marriages collapsed, they lost their husbands, or they had married wives. It also conceals the fact that adult sons who were in idigbe relationship had children who were not part of their own family but, rather belonged to their mothers’ family. While it is important to underscore that the reason for all these misreading is the operative Western episteme that privileged conjugality, it is also important to see that the misreading overemphasized the paternal role of adult male siblings on which patriliny is grounded. It does so at the expense of the tie of consanguinity that allowed the children of daughters to be full members of their mother’s family when no bridewealth was exchanged.

A consequence of overemphasizing the role of fathers is that discussions of Igbo families were set along paths that epistemologically reinforced the dominance of fathers and restructured narratives of origin to uphold a father privileging ideal. Adult sons and resident umuada whose children lived with them in family compounds were in the peculiar position of simultaneously being fathers or mothers as well as siblings (that is, brother/sister) to their own children. By contrast, “away” daughters who were living in their marital homes and “away” adult sons in idigbe unions would simply be senior sisters/brothers to the children in their natal lineage. Their own children belonged to other lineages. The point here is that regardless of their conjugal choices, or their paternal/maternal relationship to the children in the lineage, all consanguineal kins were siblings who shared a common allegiance to generations of siblings who had gone before and those yet to be unborn. It is this community, this kinship of siblings that is being misrepresented as fathers to justify a reading of families as patrilineal. To reinforce this erroneous reading, idigbe unions and woman-woman marriages were characterized as rarities even though they were not. The emphasis on patriliny invokes a logic of discourse that downplays the importance of daughter’s blood line in conceptualizing consanguinity. While patriliny underscores the importance of fathers, it does not underwrite the various forms of spousal unions that are antithetical to it. Patriliny is not complementary to or supportive of models of spousal unions that do not privilege the dominance of fathers. For this reason, the principle of family formation that encouraged idigbe relationships and woman-woman marriage could not have been patrilineal.

The principle of family formation that privileges the two lines of kins corresponds more to a dual descent principle in which daughters or sons could be founders of families and communities. Because, it does not establish all families as exclusively patrilineal, some lines of descent are based on mothers, who may be living in their lineage as ada, or they may be wives in their marital lineage. The principle also allows for a range of spousal unions and gives flexibility to both the male and female side of the family. Both sisters and brothers could marry wives, both sisters and brothers could be in relationships in which their children belong to their partners’ lineage, and both sisters and brothers could establish relationships in which their children were members of their own family. Under the Igbo consanguineal principle, families could not be patriarchal as that would mean that the male side of the family was not only controlling the affairs of the family, but was also dominating and oppressing their sisters. Such an assumption would be untrue of Igbo family and social dynamics, given that the operative principle of consanguinity did not posit a superordinate/subordinate relationship between sisters and brothers and given that people did not embody one social identity. Thus, contrary to modern day representations of Igbo family, the diokpala and other male elders of a line did not historically have overall authority over the collective body of umuada. The relationship that existed between the two sexes was more consultative and collaborative. As a group, umuada participated in the collective body of family administration, checked their brothers when they acted irresponsibly, and managed their own affairs without the authority of anyone.

Nne and Oma: The Ideology of Maternal Power

But where does the principle of consanguinity leave motherhood? The question is pertinent since wives were structurally subordinate to husbands since they were not members of the marital family. It should be pointed out that this socially subordinate position did not mean that wives were powerless and possessed no rights as existed in the Western nuclear family of the same historical period. Economic production in a subsistence economy conferred autonomy to wives/mothers, who as Amadiume and Ekejiuba convincingly showed, were responsible for their own maintenance and upkeep.[48] Their usokwu (wife’s dwelling unit and space within the marital compound)[49] was a primary space for both consumption and production, and the negotiated relationship between the spouses created a measure of interdependency and relative autonomy for both. The operative family structure was one in which spouses were protected from each other’s influence and power.[50] As was earlier discussed, the norms of marriage also created greater autonomy for wives by structurally subordinating husbands to their in-laws. Besides, once a wife became a mother her status automatically changed,[51] giving her greater rights that allowed her to reshape her conjugal unit and the larger marital family.

We should be mindful, however, that not all mothers were wives. Those in idigbe unions and others, who married wives of their own in woman-woman marriages, became mothers without becoming wives. The importance of the concept of idigbe is that it makes visible a social identity that is often conflated with wifehood. The fact that an idigbe is a mother challenges us to permanently sever the link between wifehood and motherhood, and to see that both are two separate identities. Because motherhood can exist outside of being a wife, it is a social identity on its own right. It is not rooted in a subjugated identity. Quite to the contrary, it is rooted in categories of fulfillment, regeneration, expansion and (human) plentitude. Within the Igbo universe in which humans constitute wealth, reproduction is a vitally important labor to families and the society. It is the basis of family wealth and social regeneration. It is for this reason that the attainment of motherhood moves a woman to an exalted category of empowerment and life generation. For wives, it immediately moves them out of an inferior position to one of grandeur and respect.

‘Nne’ is mother. She emerges for the first time at the birth of her first child and her mother identity is tied to that experience. Conception establishes a state of possibility that is actualized upon the safe delivery of the child. Safe delivery is a requirement to women on the path of being a mother. The mother’s entire identity changes upon delivery. She is no longer called by her name but as the “mother of x,” where x is the name of her child. The birth of a child transforms the status of a wife. She moves from the subordinate position of wife to the respected position of mother.[52] Unlike in the nuclear family context, this exalted position is not juxtaposed to any other role but stands on its own. None of what fathers do approximate or can displace the status of mothers because motherhood is a very public experience and institution of unification.

All mothers have an usokwu. Every usokwu is a nodal point of power that derives not from the spiritual ofo (authority) of a mother’s husband but from her own natal family. It is the center of child socialization activities. Motherhood is the core of usokwu formation and the seat of mothers’ power. The principle function of mothers is to grow the lineage. Children of the same mother bond together and define themselves as members of their mother’s usokwu. Being from ofu afo (literally, one womb) they are bound by ties of loyalty. Mother’s blood provides the cohesive glue that binds siblings, which men’s blood oaths attempt to mimic. Hers is the true bloodline in the family. The basis of a mother’s power is her provision of the critical organ that housed all children during their most vulnerable state of life. She willed them into being and sustained them through the gestational period. She ate for them, breathed for them, expelled their waste, and deployed her blood to work for them, all the while preserving their distinct identity. Regardless of whom they would later become in life (monarch or pauper), everyone traveled through the birth canal and was expelled through a mother’s vagina. For this reason, no one could be superior to mothers given that they were born by a mother. Indeed, everyone is a child before the mother and all other mothers.

The ideology of motherhood constituted the basis for compelling obedience from everyone who gestated in the womb. The power of motherhood covers a range of activities that continues after birth of which the most important is feeding. Breast milk provids the first nourishment in life. Without it, no newborn child would survive into adulthood even though there may be an abundance of food in the community. Because early human life is tied to lactation milk, mothers’ possess the exclusive power of life and death over children. The nurturance everyone received from mothers can never be replaced by anything the father may choose to do. The fundamental nature of these tasks constitutes the basis on which mothers command allegiance from their children. The life-giving responsibilities establish the moral parameters for belongingness and loyalty. Those within the uterine circle of life who have emerged from the “same womb,” eaten from the same pot, are the truest of kins. They are tied together by the same blood and the same nutrients.

The core of mother’s power is oma (the maternal force or spirit in the shrine of mothers). Oma, encodes the maternal ideology and preserves omumu, the principle of reproduction. Omumu (reproductive power) belongs to daughters who activate the force by means of sacrificial offerings when they become wives or idigbe, or decide to procreate. Because omumu is based in the bloodline of mothers, and derives from their maternal line, it is outside the purview and control of husbands and/or fathers. The implication of this grounding of omumu is that the potent force in consanguineal relations comes from the mother. Further reinforcing the genetic dominance of mothers is the oma that sets the terms of the deeper relational ties among siblings of the same mother. Possession of oma (the spirit of mothers) and the associated principle of omumu ensured that mothers have complete control of the psychic and physical conditions of their usokwu. On this reading, oma is a sacramental power, a force of unity that defines the boundary of humanness. Morality begins in our awareness of our relationship to the mother. This relationship coordinates the formation of interpersonal experiences that helps the child define him or herself in relation to others. Morality begins with the formation of an ego. Disloyalty to the mother or the breakage of the uterine ties of kinship is tantamount to destroying the last covenant that makes our community human. Mother’s force works by binding together umu nne (children of the mother) on a moral scheme that compels them to act together to further the interest of their usokwu within the maximal lineage.

Influenced by the underlying patriarchal values of their epistemic scheme, British colonial anthropologists underemphasized the importance of mothers and the mother line of descent within so-called patrilineal families. Given their interpretive scheme they did not conceive that mothers had any powers over their children and conjugal unit, or that they could marry wives. Consequently, they failed to acknowledge the institution of motherhood and the fact that some umuada had their own autonomous marital units either within their own lineages or within a male husband’s lineage, and that they had full custody of the children of the union. These children may become full members of her own natal family or be assimilated by her marital family. The maternal line of descent added the kind of textured layers and wrinkles that made the attribution of patriliny to Igbo families very problematic.

Within lineages, mothers and the maternal ideology were the glue that held families together. Igbo historian Michael A. Onwuegeogwu recognized this fact when he conceded that “the basic criterion of exogamy is common motherhood.”[53] The ideology of motherhood is what gives siblings and lineages a close-knit sense of loyalty and unity. Although a maximal lineage consists of children of several different mothers, the cement that binds them together is not the paternal tie as some would like to believe, but the maternal ideology and the maternal force of the founding ancestor. Even where the professed ancestor is male, it is his mother’s oma or ibe nne (the maternal force or power) that provides the superior basis for constructing ties of nwa nne (child of the same mother). B. M. Akunne, an Nri cultural historian, further puts this in perspective when he describes the power and authority of oma or ibe nne. He states that “ibe nne symboliz[es] the true spirit of unity that binds persons through common motherhood. . . . The term nne [mother] symbolically dominates nna [father] in specifying degree of relationship between persons.”[54] Because in his view, “the term and the relation nwa nna has no direct blood relation; people who have one father use the term nwa nne and not nwa nna.”[55] They are united by the ideology of the father’s mother whose authority or maternal force binds them as one. Unlike the European epistemic scheme that traces life back to the father and the first semen, the Igbo epistemic scheme traces life back to the womb. This appeal to maternal cohesiveness alerts us to the pre-eminence of mothers over fathers in family formation.

Within consanguineal families, conjugal units are subsidiary spaces where new members are born in either a son and his wife’s conjugal unit, a daughter’s own idigbe unit, a daughter and her wife’s conjugal unit, or a wife’s own conjugal unit. They are also the dominant arena where different ties of oneness and loyalty that exclude siblings of other mothers are forged and established. Within the Igbo cultural scheme, motherhood is not altogether complementary too and ancillary to the unity of the lineage. Sometimes it is the nodal point of segmentation and departure from the group. Within the lineage, family politics coalesce around motherhood or uterine or usokwu units. Through their usokwu, Igbo mothers effectively dispersed their influence through the lineage, forcing consanguineal kins to think and act in terms of uterine groupings. In accordance with the principle of inheritance, families segment and break away along motherhood maternal lines. Siblings of a breakaway usokwu would subsequently reconstitute and form a new lineage either within the same community or in another location. Although, such new lineages and the older ones are today presented as patrilineal, on closer inspection we find that the basis of their constitution, the dominant consciousness, and the most significant ancestor of the lineage is either the ancestral mother herself, or the mother of the founding male ancestor.

Conclusion: The Epistemological Challenge of Motherhood

The epistemological challenge of motherhood to patriliny derives from the fact that mothers represent the true bloodline of descent. They show up the conceptual limitations of deploying ‘patriliny,’ a term that does not truly reflect all that it claims to be, in explaining descent. The usage of the label has helped inordinately to characterize and reorganize Igbo families under male leadership and dominance. It does so at the expense of motherhood. When we attend to family dynamics, lines of division, and basis of family loyalty we see them coalescing around maternal ties, suggesting that present day lineages were actually descent lines of specific usokwus. Although, family narratives have shifted dramatically under colonial influence and Westernization to exclusively represent sons as progenies, Igbo families in the past embodied progenies of both daughters and sons. It seems that the urge to bring Igbo families in line with the operative disciplinary schemes of interpretation of Western episteme has simultaneously worked to downplay the importance of mothers.

Further undermining the theoretical prominence of mothers is the cultural shame induced by privileged Christian ethical ideals. This propelled progenies of woman-woman marriages and idigbe unions to reconstruct their family history along patriarchal lines. Many recast the husbands of their mother’s female husband into their father. Others presented their mother’s father as their father; some turned their eldest brother into the male ancestor of their line; and a few cast their mother’s paramour as their father. In the latter case, progenies presented their mother’s idigbe relationship as a formally constituted woman-man marriage even though they were aware that the relationship was not what it was billed to be. These transformations are understandable given that they are strategies for gaining legitimacy in a newly constituted sociopolitical order that privileged fatherhood and structured laws and policies to reward patriarchalism. While some would argue that there are lineages that trace their descent to some founding father, what is at issue is not the possibility that there could have been such lines of descent. What is at issue are contemporary narratives of family history. The salient issue is, what was the operative principle at the time of founding the family before the Western epistemic scheme and the Christian and colonial ideologies represented mothers as inconsequential?

To sufficiently grasp the moral force of oma or ibe nne is to see that the salient tie of unification, identity and oneness did not come from the father, but from mothers. While fathers were undoubtedly important in the scheme of things they did not carry the moral inscriptor of family unity on which the sanction of exogamy was based. It is for this reason that the principle of family segmentation has always been maternal, which is why family cleavages have always occurred along maternal lines. The oma (motherforce) that initiated separation from other consanguineal kins is the same oma that bound many generations of uterine kins in cohesive ways such that lineages which today appear to be maximal or minimal patrilineages actually trace their kinship or nwa nne (children of the mother) ties either to a specific mother, or to the usokwu of a founding male ancestor. Although the Western epistemic scheme keeps referencing the father, patriliny is intelligible only because it collapses into, and rests on maternal ties. The cohesiveness of families and lineage reflect the maternal force, which is why the ultimate appeal to family solidarity is nwa nne (children of the same mother). The question of why fathers are continually privileged goes to the heart of colonial history and the epistemic scheme within which theory building takes place.

In closing, the question of who is the mother is always the more crucial question even though the Western episteme invalidates it. To the extent that we accept the invalidation, we are actually privileging the Western episteme in seeing, interpreting and organizing Igbo cultural reality.

Bibliography

Akunne, B. M, “Ibe Nne: bond of Common Motherhood at Nri.” In Odinani (1977): 60-63.

Amadiume, Ifi. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion & Culture (London, Zed Books Ltd., 1997).

----------. Male Daughters, Female Husbands, (London, Zed Books Ltd., 1987).

----------. Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case (London, Karnak House, 1987b).

Adams, John. Remarks on the Country extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo (London, 1823), 129-34.

Basden, George. T. Niger Ibos (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1938, rpt. 1966).

Barbot, John. A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea (V. V. in Churchill’s Voyages and Travels, London: 1746), 380-1.

Ekeh, Peter P. “Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa,” Comparative Study of Society and History, (in Imperialism and Political Identity) vol. 32, no. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 660-700.

Ekejiuba, Felicia. “Down to Fundamentals: Women-centred Heathholds in Rural West Africa.” In Women Wielding the Hoe, ed. Deborah Fahy Bryceson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 47-61.

---------. “Omu Okwei: The Merchant Queen of Ossamari,” Nigeria, Sept 90 (1966): 213-220.

Green, Margaret M. Village Affairs (London, Frank Cass and Co Ltd., 1964).

Greene, Beth. “The Institution of Woman-Marriage in Africa: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Ethnology, 37, 4(Fall 1998): 395-412.

Henderson, Richard N., The King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

Ibeziako, S. M. B. The Nigerian Customary Law (Nsukka, Nigeria: Etudo Ltd., [Onitsha] 1964).

Isichei, Elizabeth. Igbo Worlds (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978).

Jones, G. I. From Slaves to Palm Oil: Slave trade and palm oil trade in the Bight of Biafra. Cambridge African Monographs 13 (Cambridge: African Studies Center, 1989.

Leith-Ross, Sylvia. African Women (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1939).

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Mba, Nina Emma, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activities in Southern Nigeria, 1900-1965, (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1982).

Meek, C. K. Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe: A Study in Indirect Rule (London: Oxford University Press 1937).

Nwapa, Flora. Efuru (London: Heinemann, 1966).

Nwose, Joseph. Oral account of the slave trade. In Igbo Worlds: An Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical Description, ed. Elizabeth Isichei (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978) 50-52.

Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Hidden Spaces, Silenced Practices and the Concept of Igba N’rira,” West Africa Review vol. 3, no. 2 (2002), http://www.westafricareview.com/war/vol3.2/nzegwu.html.

---------. “Chasing Shadows: The Misplaced Search for Matriarchy,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (Fall 1998), 594-622. Republished in West Africa Review, vol. 2, no. 1 (August 2000).

---------. “Philosophers’ Intellectual Responsibility to African Females,” American Philosophical Association’s (APA) Newsletter, 90, no.1 (1996):130-135.

Nzekwu, Onuora. Highlife for Lizards (London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd, 1965).

Obi, S. N. Chinwuba. Modern Family Law in Southern Nigeria (London, Sweet & Maxwell; Lagos, African Universities, 1966).

--------. The Ibo Law of Property (London: Butterworths, 1963).

Ogbete, Mbagwu. Oral account of Akokwa. In Igbo Worlds: An Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical Description, ed. Elizabeth Isichei (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978) 108-113.

Ohadike, Don C. Anioma: A Social History of the Western Igbo People (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994).

Onwuejeogwu, Michael Angulu. An Outline of an Igbo Civilization: Nri Kingdom and Hegemony 994 to Present (Nri: Tabansi Press, Ltd., 1980).

Pateman, Carole. “‘God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper’: Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right.” In Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, eds. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 53-73.

Thomas, Northcote E. Anthropological Report on the Ibo-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria, Part 1 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1913).

Uchendu, Victor. The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965).

Walby, Sylvia. Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

References

[1] G. T. Basden (1938, Northcote E. Thomas (1913), Sylvia Leith-Ross (1939) and C. K Meek (1937).

[2] See Basden 1938, 121. Thomas did not explicitly describe the “Ibo of the Awka Neighbourhood, S. Nigeria” in those terms, but his description of the family and the society approximates Basden’s characterization of Igbo family as based on patriarchal lines.

[3] The only time they explored issues about motherhood is when they were making distinctions between mothers and a woman was barren, or when the culture practiced infanticide.

[4] Amadiume did this in Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987) and Richard Henderson briefly explored the topic in this major text on Onitsha society (1972).

[5] They all acknowledged that northwestern Igbos have a social understanding of fatherhood, but their representation of family relations ignores the implication of that notion of fatherhood.

[6] Basden 1921, rpt. 1966, 69.

[7] Gerda Lerner 1986, 212.

[8] Pp. 213-4.

[9] Pp. 216-7.

[10] Pateman 1991, 54.

[11] Pateman 1991, 59.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Walby 1990, 20.

[14] Ibid.

[15] The fact that there was women’s opposition to the ensuing changes constitutes proof that these features were not an intrinsic part of the culture. The numerous revolts of Igbo women against disenfranchisement in the early period of colonial rule are compelling proof against the idea of women’s political irrelevance. These local and regional uprisings, include the Nwaobiala Movement of 1918 (Nina Mba, 1982, 68-72), the famous 1929 Women’s War, as well as series of skirmishes with the United Africa Company as women traders protested the latter’s sharp trading practices (G. I. Jones 1989, 96). Furthermore, the anthropological work of M. M. Green and Leith-Ross paints vivid and different pictures of Igbo women’s assertiveness.

[16] My emphasis, Obi 1966, 9. Within Obi’s framework, the smallest sub-division of a patrilineal family is the household, consisting of a man/patriarch and his wife or wives with their unmarried children and any other dependents such as wards and domestic servants.

[17] I examine elsewhere why the “corporate” designation is problematic.

[18] Obi 1967, 18.

[19] Obi 1966, 9.

[20] Ibid., 10.

[21] Ibid., 203.

[22] See “Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism” that explores anthropologists’ use of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribalism’ in African Studies. Ekeh has noted that British social anthropologists have imprecisely defined African kinship terms and categories by treating them as static, and precluding the historical examination of societies to ascertain the nature and character of kinship (1990). He argues that these terminologies were kept because, it was claimed that there were no available records of the past and because anthropologists of the time wanted to pursue a functionalist methodology that would make social anthropology relevant to the governance objectives of colonial administration. For confirmation of this see Lord Lugard’s foreword in C. K. Meek’s book (1937), v. He states: “The result has been to place at the disposal of administrators in the Tropics invaluable information and suggestions which the meagre cadre of officials in the earliest years, had neither the training nor the time to acquire” (v).

[23] Ekeh 1990, 669.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid. Ekeh had in mind the leading anthropologists of the time—Radcliffe-Brown, Evans Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes. But consider also the ahistorical work of Beth Greene who describes as “a logical out growth of creative kinship practices characteristic of African kin structures” (1998, 396).

[26] Jack Stauder also made this point in the two essays he wrote discussing the role of anthropology in the nineteenth century colonialism and its aftermath. “The Relevance of Anthropology under Imperialism” was written for the Wenner-Gren Symposium on “Relevance” in Anthropology, held in March 1970. “Functions of Functionalism” was presented at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New York, November 1971. A shortened version, by Kath Levine, of the two articles were published in The Racial Economy of Science (1993).

[27] Olaudah Equiano’s eighteenth century story of his kidnapping does a lot to reveal the emotional trauma of this period (1755).

[28] Oral histories from Olaudah Equiano and different parts of Igboland as well as the conical ino aja security architecture confirm this assessment of social upheaval. The uno aja towers were security structure within which children were hidden when their parents went to markets or the farm. For an oral history account of the sociopolitical turbulence of this period see the account of the slave trade by Mbagwu Ogbete, aged c.80, in Umuokwara, Akokwa, 15 and 16 July 1972 and 9 July 1973 in Elizabeth Isichei 1978, 111. Also see the account of Joseph Nwose, aged c.75, in Etiti, Alor, 10 July 1972, in Isichei 1978, 50-52. Furthermore, John Barbot account of Bonny/Igbo relations in 1678-82 and John Adams late eighteenth century account leaves us in no doubt about the high volume of Igbo slaves that were sold in Bonny and Old and New Calabar. The procurement of such a high volume of slaves must have radically destabilized the region from which these slaves had come. It also directs us to take seriously the ethos of the models preserved in the Caribbean not simply as an interesting model, but as attenuated capsules of nineteenth century African family systems. African Diaspora scholarship in Bahia (Brazil), Cuba, and Guiana reveals remarkable ways in which nineteenth century traditions, vocabulary and language were preserved.

[29] The founding of Ndikelionwu community provides an example of this model of family and community formation. See Elizabeth Isichei 1978, 104-107. Also historical research of Onitsha families reveals the presence of unrelated bloodlines that today appear as members of the same family. There are two types of such bloodlines. The first type consists of families that have established their own autonomy after having constructed mythical genealogies, including inventing nonexistent offspring for the founder, to pass themselves off as part of the direct line of descent. The second type consists of families that did not separate from the family into which they had merged. They share the same names and history. It is only during ritual matters, when they are excluded from performing certain rites, that it becomes obvious they are part of the genealogical line. Investigation often reveals that the latter branches may have been the line of a domestic servant, slave, or an immigrant who lived with the family.

[30] This section was constructed from personal interviews and research carried over a period of thirty years about practices in the following areas—Onitsha, Aguleri, Nando, Mbaukwu, and Awka, as well as critically reading the works of Thomas, Basden, Margaret M. Green, Leith-Ross, Richard and Helen Henderson, and transcripts of the Women’s War.

[31] See Thomas 1913, 69. this happens even with the knowledge of husbands. See Basden 1921, rpt., 1966, 94. Interestingly, when these actions are balanced with those that purport to regulate women, such as the do’s and don’t of marriage, the fact of sexual autonomy overshadows the restrictions that appear as petulant minor issues.

[32] That is, a relationship that is not necessarily “extra,” but transcends or goes beyond the marital union.

[33] This is by no means an exhaustive list of the sanctioned transmarital relationships. On another note, I should state that I will not be discussing cases where daughters have chosen to remain in, or returned t, the homestead to continue the family line by having children. This is because the focus is on wives who are outsiders, who do not have any genealogical connection with the family. By contrast, by virtue of being a daughter, the daughter has direct ties to the family, to the father pole. Igbo legal theorist S. N. Chinwuba Obi recognizes this fact, but thinks that there is nothing significant about it. According to him, the fact that daughters may step in to continue a family line does not change anything, because it “does not disturb the normal rules of inheritance” (1963, 185). If a daughter dies without issue, the normal line of succession operates as if she never existed. If, however, she does bear sons, they will succeed in accordance with “the normal principle of primogeniture” (185). For someone who is exceptionally male-centered and father-focused, Obi fails, interestingly enough, to see that such a daughter can alter the male-father pole, since her sons and daughters would have a different father.

[34] This is the period between engagement and the formal relocation of the bride to her marital home.

[35] Though Igbo male scholars may be reluctant to discuss these examples, and may want to treat them as extremely rare cases, they are quite common practices in Igbo social life.

[36] By limiting my claims to the nineteenth century, I do not mean to state that the phenomenon does not go further back in time. It simply means that my historical data only go that far back.

[37] See pp. 203-205, the section on “Husband’s General Position vis-à-vis His Wife.” There, he discusses that a husband is entitled to respect and obedience from his wife. Obi may be wishing that this state of affairs was the norm, but after learning of the ways wives’ use food to force their husbands into submission, and of the high rate of divorce and runaway wives, it is clear that husband’s entitlement to respect and obedience is predicated on his meeting his wives’ demands and his obligations as they see them.

[38] Because in the European and American nuclear family of the early twentieth century, women’s sexuality and reproductive powers were controlled by husbands, scholars tended to think that the same sort of control was exerted on all women worldwide. Predictably, therefore, they exported inappropriate gender ideologies as they tried to find the strong hand of men lurking everywhere in the background, guiding, sanctioning, and directing social and political affairs. In the patriarchal scheme of the West, once the transactional rite of marriage is completed (“to have and to hold till death do us part”), a husband is guaranteed proprietary right over the wife. Another man cannot have access to her body or be responsible for her pregnancy. Because marriage transfers a wife to a groom completely, the concept of faithfulness is used to regulate a wife’s autonomy, restrain her sexuality, and pry open her control of her body. Consequently, that violation activates deep feelings of betrayal and intense jealously in the husband. Charges of infidelity ameliorate this loss of control and are assuaged by the public stigmatization of the child as bastard and castigation of the mother as fallen.

[39] Historically, husbands had to assist their in-laws in farm work of fishing in what was called olu ogo (in-law’s work). In modern times, this consists in providing labor during celebratory and distressful family events such as engagements, weddings, medical issues, funerals, as well as in a minutiae of other ways when material and moral support is called for.

[40] Igbo marriages did not permanently transfer daughters to husbands as occurred in European and Judeo Christian forms of marriages. Should their marriages end, they returned to their natal kins; and on their death, their bodies were returned for burial with their kin group.

[41] Evidence shows that during this period of post-Ogidi war 1850s and the war with Obosi, Onitsha contracted as families moved closer to the central core and away from their outlying settlement at the border of the town. It seems that this was when strictures about daughters’ marrying Igbo emerged. Also see Basden on the state of insecurity during this period pp. 104-111.

[42] I have extensively argued this point in “Chasing Shadows” (2001).

[43] Thomas p. 17.

[44] In Onitsha, for example, the children of Umuezechima include the children of Olosi.

[45] Though she is to be commended for her insights, Amadiume fell foul of this critical prescription by continually centering and using the conjugal unit to begin analysis of Igbo families.

[46] See Don C. Ohadike (1994), 16-18.

[47] See Richard N. Henderson 1972, 451-452.

[48] See Amadiume (1997, 1987b) and Ekejiuba (1995, 1966). Igbo mothers had social and economic responsibilities towards themselves, their children, dependents, parents, and siblings. They traded, farmed, processed agricultural products, manufactured textiles, mats, pottery and a whole set of other activities. Socially and politically, they administered the community through their women’s councils.

[49] This is also called mkpuke by Igbos east of Onitsha.

[50] Elsewhere I have argued that the implication of family interrelationship and the logic of constantly shifting superordinate/subordinate roles mean that no one is ever exhaustively defined by one identity or role. Autonomous spaces are created that are dependent on seniority, or some specific duties that one performs. See Nzegwu “Chasing Shadows: The Misplaced Search for Matriarchy,” (1998), 594-622.

[51] I have written about wives as agents of colonization. See “Chasing Shadows” (1998). When marriage is looked at from the perspective of wives, they appear as stouthearted travelers who move into other families to reshape both the genetic histories and values of “strangers.” If we take that imagery seriously enough, we begin to understand why as mothers, wives are truly appreciated by affinal families. They make possible their expansion by giving birth to new members, and ensuring the survival of the family.

[52] It is important to state that the woman who is unable to bear a child can still have children by marrying a wife.

[53] Onwuegeogwu 1980, 53. Also it is interesting how Onwuejeogwu tries to minimize this power by means of unfortunate language such as “Women are reciprocally exchanged as wealth among about twenty-seven exogamous groups…” “exchang[ing] women among themselves…” (1980, 53).

[54] Akunne 1977, 60.

[55] Ibid, 60.

Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 5, 2004